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I read these articles sometimes about crypto games, but they all never seem to describe the actual game, it’s like crypto is the primary concern, and game is se

I read these articles sometimes about crypto games, but they all never seem to describe the actual game, it’s like crypto is the primary concern, and game is secondary, and i’m getting the distinct impression none of these games are any fun and everyone in the space has to avoid mentioning it. I think that the people writing these things only have a very slim grasp of gaming, but they know it would be a good market to capture

Melchori 4y ago
Gaming with being able to earn money is something I normally call gambling or work. It's depressing to think about it. And yes people who made gold in wow were also not gaming but working. It wasn't cool, fun or whatever 10 years ago
- coding123 4y ago
  I also had fun making gold in Skyrim, which was offline. I don't recall it being work, but whatever.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It can be a puzzle with a built in score and fun, but rarely are these direct-to-cash games fun. D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.
    - supernewton 4y ago
      I mean, the real improvement to D3 was they massively upped the drop rate of rare items, which "coincidentally" happened when they stopped taking a cut off people selling their rare items for real money.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah. The money always causes a conflict with the fun. Only the pure cosmetic games seem to avoid that when the money flows.
    - csa 4y ago
      Very much agreed, but… My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece that I sold for $25. That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay at the start of the game. I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I knew they didn’t stay on AH long. That said, I didn’t want to compete with all of the lower price point folks, so i set the price to something absurd just to see what happened. I have no idea why they bought it. I had much better late game stuff for sale for much cheaper that never sold. It was a strange market — I’m glad it is gone.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        People would search by “best I can equip” and you caught a whale.
    - px43 4y ago
      In my opinion, nothing has ever come close to the rich economic system that emerged naturally in Diablo 2. Maybe it just hit me at a good time in my life, towards the end of high school. I spent probably half my time playing that game just doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily buy an SOJ from a barbarian or amazon for 3-4 Perfect Skulls. Through nothing but these trades I was able to go from a couple SOJ (the most valuable 1x1 item in the game) to about 40 or 50 over the course of a few months.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        There was a stable economy time where there weren’t continual “buff patches” dumping more and more items, and it was a good time.
      - jholman 4y ago
        You sound like you've never played Eve Online
    - charlieyu1 4y ago
      I would disagree with that. D3 RMAH was bad because D3 was bad. At that time there was basically no itemisation, everything gear was basically dps/main stat/trifecta. D3 was so bad that the fix was to remove trading completely and never been brought back. People traded D2 items for gear, runes and/or real money for decades, there is no problem and the game is alive for well.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    Offline is key here
  - Melchori 4y ago
    That's not the point I was making. Playing a little bit with game economics is fun to a certain point.
- UberFly 4y ago
  You are obviously not a gamer or understand the appeal.
  - Melchori 4y ago
    Very interesting to find this type of sentiment on hn. But let me clarify: I lived the wow time. It destroyed 3 relationships from friends I know, it broke carrier chances for 2. Yes there is a difference between grinding a little bit of gold vs playing it all day, not doing anything else anymore for your life and bragging about being able to buy a month abo with in-game gold I totally get the appeal of challenges in well running raids but there was always the one person who made the game the only life content. And yes there are still people being hardcore addicted to games like shooter. Depressed friends risking everything worthwhile for it. Understithe appeal doesn't invalidate my comment.
- reidjs 4y ago
  Gambling and gaming are quite interconnected, maybe you can describe it as a spectrum between games and gambling. Free single player games are the 'purest' games, you're only betting that it's worth your time. Cheap single player games, you're still gambling in that you're 'betting' the game is worth your time and $5. Closer to the gambling side are things like Poker, CS Skins, the Diablo Auction House, Eve Online mining, etc. Probably the purest form of gambling is slot machines, since they are purely random chance.
  - glitchc 4y ago
    This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is akin to gambling: You don’t know how good it is until you start reading. Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      People with absurd notions very often conflate the colloquial definition and the precise definition of words and then try to draw conclusions out of the confusion. Like anti-science people who talk about theories and theories.
    - firebaze 4y ago
      I suppose I'm overlooking something, since I cannot follow this line of reasoning. When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean, or it is a classic I just never bought yet). Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in either of these cases, there is a less than 50% chance I perceive the book as good. Which, to me, is a gamble. So I suppose there is an edge I don't get?
      - admax88qqq 4y ago
        Not all "risks" are "gambling"
      - 4y ago
- px43 4y ago
  The status quo in gaming today is that people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc, and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the lives we live in virtual spaces. Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW. You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a market game, gambling on the outcome of a game, or crypto-tokenized items/stats. These have their own problems as well, mostly being that their development structure is usually not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency.
    - lmm 4y ago
      > You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. Surely you could have a smart contract that implements that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button inputs you used or something - of course there's no way to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons at the right time, but that applies to real WoW too).
      - cowtools 4y ago
        I have considered this already. That does not solve anything here, for the reasons you have mentioned yourself. To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof". Eventually, so many people will cheat that the actual game is considered to be a minor nusance. It's like TF2 idle servers. You incentivise players to not play the game.
- Seanambers 4y ago
  Thing is in WOW you had a large population of actual gamers who were willing to pay real hard currency for ingame currency. Because the game in itself was attractive as a game. Cryptokittens have none of that value.
alanfalcon 4y ago
CryptoKitties is a lot of fun, for what it is. It's super deep and while it's more of a sandbox than a typical game, I became obsessed with it when it came out, though not for monetary reasons (if it has one huge drawback as a game, it's always been how much it costs IMO). Became so obsessed that I ended up hired by Dapper Labs and working on the CryptoKitties team, later helped design and launch NBA Top Shot on Flow. Now that we have (the markedly cheaper and easier) Flow and lots and lots of lessons learned from building NFT products, I'm excited for us to bring the next generation of CryptoKitties to life. If you want to check out a fun crypto game that just recently launched from another developer, I urge you to check out dimensionxnft.com with an open mind.
- midislack 4y ago
  OK but WHAT IS THE GAME? What do you DO with CryptoKitties?
  - digitaLandscape 4y ago
    You breed them. It reminded me of horse breeding games my girlfriend used to play. Kind of fun. Not worth the ongoing cost though.
    - midislack 4y ago
      For me it's the Mary Kate and Ashley horse breeding game on the Game Boy Color.
      - hgsgm 4y ago
  - JeremyNT 4y ago
    Disclaimer: I haven't played it, but I read this article. It looks like a pet breeding game. You "own" cartoon cats - visual representations of distinctive bundles of characteristics contained in a NFT. You generate more NFTs by "breeding" two existing cats (executing the smart contract), which results in random combinations of their characteristics in offspring. What to do with them? Speculate on their value, same as any NFT. As a "game" this sounds incredibly unsophisticated compared to normal video games - something that might have passed during the flash era of gaming, or maybe today on itch.io as a weekend project. The only "hook" outside of this is the speculation / potential to earn (and I imagine if you're in on the scam, earning is a lot of fun).
xani_ 4y ago
They are like porn games, the gameplay is not the focus, fucking is. Except it's you getting fucked in crypto.
- john_alan 4y ago
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ycta202249823 4y ago
  There are some porn games that are considered very fun and even influential on the larger games industry, particularly coming out of Japan such as Rance[0], a grand strategy series that's run for over 30 years. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_(series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_(series)
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  I wonder if there are any prn games where the gameplay is so good you forget about the prn
  - yw3410 4y ago
    The Fate series which later spawned a massive franchise (multiple games, movies and books) started off as an eroge.
    - astrange 4y ago
      It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel, and like your average fantasy novel it's also an extremely long retelling of the author's tabletop game. (Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it. Not sure how that happened.)
mrtksn 4y ago
I remember when CryptoKitties clogged the ETH blockchain and it has become unfeasible to do most of the transactions. Anyway, the game is very simple and it actually makes much more sense than the recent NFT fud. Essentially you combine characters to create new characters that have some of the traits of the parent characters. It's a breeding game. I kind of see how it can be valuable to own an NFT character with certain traits that can be used to create other NFT characters. Unlike the recent NFT stuff, it makes sense within its universe. The NFT market on the other hand is just a hot patato game where you speculate that there exist a greater fool in a rigged marketplace.
TomGullen 4y ago
Gamer sentiment is generally very anti micro transactions, all the crypto games I’ve seen so far are micro transactions front and centre on steroids
- hgsgm 4y ago
naet 4y ago
Check https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play The reason it seems like they didn't describe the "actual game" is that there is no actual "gameplay". You just pay to collect cats. You can trade the cat tokens with other people, try to sell them on the marketplace, pay to generate semi randomized new cat tokens via "breeding", and... just have them under your wallet / name. There is no action, no RPG, no platforming, no game board... basically nothing besides collecting and swapping tokens. They actually do show the entire "gameplay loop" in this image from the article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-flow-chart-with-arrows-between-cartoon-kittens.jpg?id=30811836&width=1984&quality=80 https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-flow-chart-with-ar... They encourage you to collect more with timed events, where you "win" a bonus for having collected a certain type of cat token, but that's about it. If you're of a certain generation, you might remember a craze of kids collecting and trading Pokemon cards, and never really playing the game. It's basically like that except there is no underlying game to play, all you have are the tradable cards.
- Seanambers 4y ago
  It was all just marketing all along :) Thanks for the enlightening comment!
- im3w1l 4y ago
  I remember the craze around collecting the cards without really playing the game. And then, separately, playing the game without collecting the cards, with the "Pokemon Trading Card Game" for game boy.
- pwillia7 4y ago
  There is a magic the gathering like trading card game on ethereum that seems neat. I doubt it will get big enough to make sense, but having come from paper MTG as a kid and not being able to really digitally collect cards since... that would be super cool. You would actually 'own' the cards.
  - Aaronstotle 4y ago
    Are you talking about sky weaver? I started playing it and I am having fun, unfortunately I'm not good enough to beat any real players though.
Tao3300 4y ago
Once again, there's nothing there. Pay, breed, sell. That's it! You didn't miss anything!
throw101010 4y ago
I generally agree with your sentiment. It's also not helping that so many of these games are just card collecting games, because there was a need to integrate NFTs somehow (that's where profit is for the developers) so collectibles was the easy answer... and then they have pasted some lousy "gameplay" on top of it. Also there is a whole exploitative side to certain of these games which setup a deliberately very high cost of entry, incentivizing a rent-seeking market where rich owners borrow their entry ticket and let poorer people work to earn the daily rewards available in game for them (because at this point it isn't really playing anymore). I know of one notable exception, Cypto Royale [0], it's definitely a simple appearing game, basically multiplayer rock/paper/scissor mechanics, but if you do play it you can notice few more layers in gameplay (placement, size/hp management, wall physics)... so there is a bit of strategy and skill involved. Unlike so many other cyptogames they also don't require you to own or even know about crypto to play (it is free to play, it doesn't even require an account). Their approach, even for a simple looking game, seems way closer to actual gaming as a way to potentially get players accustomed to crypto. [0] https://cryptoroyale.one/ https://cryptoroyale.one/
m3kw9 4y ago
The game is the game of life where you try to make the most money
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
trevelyan 4y ago
Chiming in because we have an open source game engine on Saito (https://saito.io/arcade https://saito.io/arcade) which imo is the future of crypto gaming but is usually overlooked by people who want to talk about crypto gaming because what they want to talk about is tokens and speculation rather than actual games. If you check out the Arcade you'll see there are lots of fun games - my personal favorites are Twilight Struggle, Poker and Red Imperium. You can do things have encrypted peer-to-peer chat and video channels while gaming, and all gameplay is provably fair. Agree there is a bias in media coverage, but it's not because there isn't fun stuff happening and is more because of selection-bias towards talking about speculative assets and token speculation. Also not a tremendous amount of overlap between people who actually play games and those pitching breathless articles to tech media.
erwinh 4y ago
Yeah lots of “cart before the horse” happening in this space. When talking about games these days we often imagine rich engaging audio/visual interactive experiences. The crypto people don’t really seem to understand that kind of game. But there are also more turn-based games which really are about the mechanics of which items/stats/buildings/lands you have, what their effects are, how to level up etc which all could be encoded in the chain. Its not a mainstream gaming format but thats where crypto ‘gaming’ could provide a new kind of experience. Although I would say the term on-chain game is more specific. The “game” could become as much about finding tools that give you an edge in accessing and navigating the on-chain data from yourself and other ‘players’. The genre is then competitive turn-based strategy with a turn timer (block time). I would compare it to playing competitive Civilisation with full map vision and real cash rewards. Which isn’t really mainstream gaming atm although I’m sure there is a minor audience for it, but for now I expect real on-chain gaming to stay pretty niche.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Something like the 40-year-old-and-still-ongoing DnD game might make sense in this setting [1] Considering blockchains survive for 40 years which is not a given. [1] https://nerdist.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-neverending-game-35-years/ https://nerdist.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-neverending...
  - erwinh 4y ago
    wow, thats a nice example as well
patriksvensson 4y ago
See Dark Forrest which I believe is the best example of a game, on Ethereum, which is crypto native. https://blog.zkga.me/announcing-darkforest https://blog.zkga.me/announcing-darkforest
neals 4y ago
Crypto aside, most collectable card games aren't very much fun in my opinion.
ramijames 4y ago
I interviewed the head of a group who funds crypto games and his take was that these types of games no longer get funded exactly because of that. They aren't really fun because they aren't really games. https://youtu.be/0hzyW-MLSBw https://youtu.be/0hzyW-MLSBw
tinus_hn 4y ago
It’s just a remnant from the year when ‘blockchain’ and ‘crypto’ where the big buzzwords that attracted investors.

Melchori 4y ago

Gaming with being able to earn money is something I normally call gambling or work. It's depressing to think about it. And yes people who made gold in wow were also not gaming but working. It wasn't cool, fun or whatever 10 years ago

coding123 4y ago
I also had fun making gold in Skyrim, which was offline. I don't recall it being work, but whatever.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It can be a puzzle with a built in score and fun, but rarely are these direct-to-cash games fun. D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.
  - supernewton 4y ago
    I mean, the real improvement to D3 was they massively upped the drop rate of rare items, which "coincidentally" happened when they stopped taking a cut off people selling their rare items for real money.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah. The money always causes a conflict with the fun. Only the pure cosmetic games seem to avoid that when the money flows.
  - csa 4y ago
    Very much agreed, but… My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece that I sold for $25. That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay at the start of the game. I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I knew they didn’t stay on AH long. That said, I didn’t want to compete with all of the lower price point folks, so i set the price to something absurd just to see what happened. I have no idea why they bought it. I had much better late game stuff for sale for much cheaper that never sold. It was a strange market — I’m glad it is gone.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      People would search by “best I can equip” and you caught a whale.
  - px43 4y ago
    In my opinion, nothing has ever come close to the rich economic system that emerged naturally in Diablo 2. Maybe it just hit me at a good time in my life, towards the end of high school. I spent probably half my time playing that game just doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily buy an SOJ from a barbarian or amazon for 3-4 Perfect Skulls. Through nothing but these trades I was able to go from a couple SOJ (the most valuable 1x1 item in the game) to about 40 or 50 over the course of a few months.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      There was a stable economy time where there weren’t continual “buff patches” dumping more and more items, and it was a good time.
    - jholman 4y ago
      You sound like you've never played Eve Online
  - charlieyu1 4y ago
    I would disagree with that. D3 RMAH was bad because D3 was bad. At that time there was basically no itemisation, everything gear was basically dps/main stat/trifecta. D3 was so bad that the fix was to remove trading completely and never been brought back. People traded D2 items for gear, runes and/or real money for decades, there is no problem and the game is alive for well.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Offline is key here
- Melchori 4y ago
  That's not the point I was making. Playing a little bit with game economics is fun to a certain point.
UberFly 4y ago
You are obviously not a gamer or understand the appeal.
- Melchori 4y ago
  Very interesting to find this type of sentiment on hn. But let me clarify: I lived the wow time. It destroyed 3 relationships from friends I know, it broke carrier chances for 2. Yes there is a difference between grinding a little bit of gold vs playing it all day, not doing anything else anymore for your life and bragging about being able to buy a month abo with in-game gold I totally get the appeal of challenges in well running raids but there was always the one person who made the game the only life content. And yes there are still people being hardcore addicted to games like shooter. Depressed friends risking everything worthwhile for it. Understithe appeal doesn't invalidate my comment.
reidjs 4y ago
Gambling and gaming are quite interconnected, maybe you can describe it as a spectrum between games and gambling. Free single player games are the 'purest' games, you're only betting that it's worth your time. Cheap single player games, you're still gambling in that you're 'betting' the game is worth your time and $5. Closer to the gambling side are things like Poker, CS Skins, the Diablo Auction House, Eve Online mining, etc. Probably the purest form of gambling is slot machines, since they are purely random chance.
- glitchc 4y ago
  This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is akin to gambling: You don’t know how good it is until you start reading. Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    People with absurd notions very often conflate the colloquial definition and the precise definition of words and then try to draw conclusions out of the confusion. Like anti-science people who talk about theories and theories.
  - firebaze 4y ago
    I suppose I'm overlooking something, since I cannot follow this line of reasoning. When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean, or it is a classic I just never bought yet). Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in either of these cases, there is a less than 50% chance I perceive the book as good. Which, to me, is a gamble. So I suppose there is an edge I don't get?
    - admax88qqq 4y ago
      Not all "risks" are "gambling"
    - 4y ago
px43 4y ago
The status quo in gaming today is that people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc, and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the lives we live in virtual spaces. Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW. You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a market game, gambling on the outcome of a game, or crypto-tokenized items/stats. These have their own problems as well, mostly being that their development structure is usually not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. Surely you could have a smart contract that implements that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button inputs you used or something - of course there's no way to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons at the right time, but that applies to real WoW too).
    - cowtools 4y ago
      I have considered this already. That does not solve anything here, for the reasons you have mentioned yourself. To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof". Eventually, so many people will cheat that the actual game is considered to be a minor nusance. It's like TF2 idle servers. You incentivise players to not play the game.
Seanambers 4y ago
Thing is in WOW you had a large population of actual gamers who were willing to pay real hard currency for ingame currency. Because the game in itself was attractive as a game. Cryptokittens have none of that value.

alanfalcon 4y ago

CryptoKitties is a lot of fun, for what it is. It's super deep and while it's more of a sandbox than a typical game, I became obsessed with it when it came out, though not for monetary reasons (if it has one huge drawback as a game, it's always been how much it costs IMO). Became so obsessed that I ended up hired by Dapper Labs and working on the CryptoKitties team, later helped design and launch NBA Top Shot on Flow. Now that we have (the markedly cheaper and easier) Flow and lots and lots of lessons learned from building NFT products, I'm excited for us to bring the next generation of CryptoKitties to life. If you want to check out a fun crypto game that just recently launched from another developer, I urge you to check out dimensionxnft.com with an open mind.

midislack 4y ago
OK but WHAT IS THE GAME? What do you DO with CryptoKitties?
- digitaLandscape 4y ago
  You breed them. It reminded me of horse breeding games my girlfriend used to play. Kind of fun. Not worth the ongoing cost though.
  - midislack 4y ago
    For me it's the Mary Kate and Ashley horse breeding game on the Game Boy Color.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I haven't played it, but I read this article. It looks like a pet breeding game. You "own" cartoon cats - visual representations of distinctive bundles of characteristics contained in a NFT. You generate more NFTs by "breeding" two existing cats (executing the smart contract), which results in random combinations of their characteristics in offspring. What to do with them? Speculate on their value, same as any NFT. As a "game" this sounds incredibly unsophisticated compared to normal video games - something that might have passed during the flash era of gaming, or maybe today on itch.io as a weekend project. The only "hook" outside of this is the speculation / potential to earn (and I imagine if you're in on the scam, earning is a lot of fun).

xani_ 4y ago

They are like porn games, the gameplay is not the focus, fucking is. Except it's you getting fucked in crypto.

john_alan 4y ago
- jbverschoor 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ycta202249823 4y ago
There are some porn games that are considered very fun and even influential on the larger games industry, particularly coming out of Japan such as Rance[0], a grand strategy series that's run for over 30 years. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_(series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_(series)
cuteboy19 4y ago
I wonder if there are any prn games where the gameplay is so good you forget about the prn
- yw3410 4y ago
  The Fate series which later spawned a massive franchise (multiple games, movies and books) started off as an eroge.
  - astrange 4y ago
    It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel, and like your average fantasy novel it's also an extremely long retelling of the author's tabletop game. (Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it. Not sure how that happened.)

mrtksn 4y ago

I remember when CryptoKitties clogged the ETH blockchain and it has become unfeasible to do most of the transactions. Anyway, the game is very simple and it actually makes much more sense than the recent NFT fud. Essentially you combine characters to create new characters that have some of the traits of the parent characters. It's a breeding game. I kind of see how it can be valuable to own an NFT character with certain traits that can be used to create other NFT characters. Unlike the recent NFT stuff, it makes sense within its universe. The NFT market on the other hand is just a hot patato game where you speculate that there exist a greater fool in a rigged marketplace.

TomGullen 4y ago

Gamer sentiment is generally very anti micro transactions, all the crypto games I’ve seen so far are micro transactions front and centre on steroids

hgsgm 4y ago

naet 4y ago

Check https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play The reason it seems like they didn't describe the "actual game" is that there is no actual "gameplay". You just pay to collect cats. You can trade the cat tokens with other people, try to sell them on the marketplace, pay to generate semi randomized new cat tokens via "breeding", and... just have them under your wallet / name. There is no action, no RPG, no platforming, no game board... basically nothing besides collecting and swapping tokens. They actually do show the entire "gameplay loop" in this image from the article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-flow-chart-with-arrows-between-cartoon-kittens.jpg?id=30811836&width=1984&quality=80 https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-flow-chart-with-ar... They encourage you to collect more with timed events, where you "win" a bonus for having collected a certain type of cat token, but that's about it. If you're of a certain generation, you might remember a craze of kids collecting and trading Pokemon cards, and never really playing the game. It's basically like that except there is no underlying game to play, all you have are the tradable cards.

Seanambers 4y ago
It was all just marketing all along :) Thanks for the enlightening comment!
im3w1l 4y ago
I remember the craze around collecting the cards without really playing the game. And then, separately, playing the game without collecting the cards, with the "Pokemon Trading Card Game" for game boy.
pwillia7 4y ago
There is a magic the gathering like trading card game on ethereum that seems neat. I doubt it will get big enough to make sense, but having come from paper MTG as a kid and not being able to really digitally collect cards since... that would be super cool. You would actually 'own' the cards.
- Aaronstotle 4y ago
  Are you talking about sky weaver? I started playing it and I am having fun, unfortunately I'm not good enough to beat any real players though.

Tao3300 4y ago

Once again, there's nothing there. Pay, breed, sell. That's it! You didn't miss anything!

throw101010 4y ago

I generally agree with your sentiment. It's also not helping that so many of these games are just card collecting games, because there was a need to integrate NFTs somehow (that's where profit is for the developers) so collectibles was the easy answer... and then they have pasted some lousy "gameplay" on top of it. Also there is a whole exploitative side to certain of these games which setup a deliberately very high cost of entry, incentivizing a rent-seeking market where rich owners borrow their entry ticket and let poorer people work to earn the daily rewards available in game for them (because at this point it isn't really playing anymore). I know of one notable exception, Cypto Royale [0], it's definitely a simple appearing game, basically multiplayer rock/paper/scissor mechanics, but if you do play it you can notice few more layers in gameplay (placement, size/hp management, wall physics)... so there is a bit of strategy and skill involved. Unlike so many other cyptogames they also don't require you to own or even know about crypto to play (it is free to play, it doesn't even require an account). Their approach, even for a simple looking game, seems way closer to actual gaming as a way to potentially get players accustomed to crypto. [0] https://cryptoroyale.one/ https://cryptoroyale.one/

m3kw9 4y ago

The game is the game of life where you try to make the most money

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

trevelyan 4y ago

Chiming in because we have an open source game engine on Saito (https://saito.io/arcade https://saito.io/arcade) which imo is the future of crypto gaming but is usually overlooked by people who want to talk about crypto gaming because what they want to talk about is tokens and speculation rather than actual games. If you check out the Arcade you'll see there are lots of fun games - my personal favorites are Twilight Struggle, Poker and Red Imperium. You can do things have encrypted peer-to-peer chat and video channels while gaming, and all gameplay is provably fair. Agree there is a bias in media coverage, but it's not because there isn't fun stuff happening and is more because of selection-bias towards talking about speculative assets and token speculation. Also not a tremendous amount of overlap between people who actually play games and those pitching breathless articles to tech media.

erwinh 4y ago

Yeah lots of “cart before the horse” happening in this space. When talking about games these days we often imagine rich engaging audio/visual interactive experiences. The crypto people don’t really seem to understand that kind of game. But there are also more turn-based games which really are about the mechanics of which items/stats/buildings/lands you have, what their effects are, how to level up etc which all could be encoded in the chain. Its not a mainstream gaming format but thats where crypto ‘gaming’ could provide a new kind of experience. Although I would say the term on-chain game is more specific. The “game” could become as much about finding tools that give you an edge in accessing and navigating the on-chain data from yourself and other ‘players’. The genre is then competitive turn-based strategy with a turn timer (block time). I would compare it to playing competitive Civilisation with full map vision and real cash rewards. Which isn’t really mainstream gaming atm although I’m sure there is a minor audience for it, but for now I expect real on-chain gaming to stay pretty niche.

dmitriid 4y ago
Something like the 40-year-old-and-still-ongoing DnD game might make sense in this setting [1] Considering blockchains survive for 40 years which is not a given. [1] https://nerdist.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-neverending-game-35-years/ https://nerdist.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-neverending...
- erwinh 4y ago
  wow, thats a nice example as well

patriksvensson 4y ago

See Dark Forrest which I believe is the best example of a game, on Ethereum, which is crypto native. https://blog.zkga.me/announcing-darkforest https://blog.zkga.me/announcing-darkforest

neals 4y ago

Crypto aside, most collectable card games aren't very much fun in my opinion.

ramijames 4y ago

I interviewed the head of a group who funds crypto games and his take was that these types of games no longer get funded exactly because of that. They aren't really fun because they aren't really games. https://youtu.be/0hzyW-MLSBw https://youtu.be/0hzyW-MLSBw

tinus_hn 4y ago

It’s just a remnant from the year when ‘blockchain’ and ‘crypto’ where the big buzzwords that attracted investors.